One more bad encounter for the inventory.

Content Warnings include descriptions of sexual harm in a party setting in Oberlin, athletics, and repeated sexual advances and consent violations.

I had always thought you looked kinda cute. I would see you around at Passover celebrations, at frisbee parties. You had even kissed one of my friends the year before.

We match on Tinder the same day of the party. You pull me to dance in the house I’d been in so many times before, the house that felt so safe. You take me away from the girl I am trying to flirt with and pull me close. I can tell you are drunk. We don’t even talk –– do you even know my name? You kiss me and I go along. I am happy to kiss someone new after my ex.

You take me in front of the house, sneaking behind the cars, not exactly visible to witnesses. Ask if I want to go back to your place. No. So you guide me to the back of the house. Start touching me in places you haven’t asked consent for. I say, please stop, I just got out of a long relationship and am not ready for this. So you try something else. No. Try something else. No. Exhaust possibilities until I say, you don’t understand, she was my first love. Then you understand. Stop trying to get me and give me unsolicited relationship advice instead. Why did I justify not wanting you for more than a kiss at a party?

Then my mind takes me to the self-defense pattern that started at 16: I don’t strongly say no because then you are contemplating the choice of respecting it or not. And if you don’t, I can’t pretend that something wrong didn’t happen to me. I just freeze and wait till it’s over. One more bad encounter for the inventory. But this wasn’t even supposed to be about you. I wanted a distraction from the girl who broke my heart.

You gave me a distraction, all right. The next day, I mention your name to a friend and find out you have a bad reputation. Complaints in and outside of the team. I find out you were banned from team co-ed spaces for a while, that your “educational measures” for redemption weren’t very thorough, that you were not allowed to drink in team co-ed spaces. By now I am fuming: Why were you there? Why were you drunk? This is not the rebound I asked for. Turns out it was an open party; you could do whatever the fuck you wanted.

I feel weird for weeks. You had bothered other girls before, and yet I kissed you. And yet, you bothered me. I feel like a traitor to my sisters, even though I didn’t know.

I avoid you as months go by. You text me on Tinder and I never look. One day, you announce you are transferring schools, reasons unknown. I exchange smiles with close friends, relieved. Then I realize that you are not my problem anymore –– but that the girls at the new school don’t know about you either. The cycle continues.